murph writes: "Join us at the seventh annual Ohio LinuxFest on September 25-27, 2009 in Columbus, Ohio.The Ohio LinuxFest is a conference for the Free and Open Source software communities. Featuring talks by authoritative speakers, a large expo, tutorials, and more, the Ohio LinuxFest welcomes Free and Open Source Source professionals and enthusiasts of all ages and from all places to join us as we celebrate 40 years of unix."

eldavojohn writes: "Reuters is reporting on a lawsuit that may cost Ticketmaster USD 410 Million. This is because of their TicketsNow resale auction site. Here's how it works: the user is informed that there are no tickets left for the auction and then they are redirected to Ticketmaster's auction site (TicketsNow) to bid on tickets. Why do they do this? To prevent scalping they claim. This comes shortly after Bruce Springsteen got upset with the same service. Ticketmaster is also in talks with a merger acquisition of Live Nation, the only other major ticket retailer online--literally expected to happen today."

longacre writes: "Buried in President Obama's much debated $1 trillion stimulus bill are a good number of provisions that neither party have gotten around discussing in much detail, some not at all. Perhaps it should raise some eyebrows that one of those non-discussed provisions in the version passed by the House of Representatives involves $2 billion to develop an entirely new health information infrastructure, or HIT, headed by a new Office of the National Coordinator for Health Technology. Among other goals of this new infrastructure, "The utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014," as well as a standardized system to allow sharing of those health records for government and health care provider use. Amazingly, Google web and news searches on this issue, which the bill itself admits would affect "every individual in the United States," reveal only a single media piece on the provision: a decidedly slanted op-ed."

Smith Jarrod writes: "Both AMD and NVIDIA are now subjects of a large class action lawsuit that alleges that both companies conspired and colluded to fix prices on both GPU chips and graphics cards. There's even email exchanges between ATI's Dave Orton and NVIDIA's Dan Vivoli. Orton even says in an email "unless we really talk about our strategies, we are competitors.""

Kwiik writes: Days after the original news has hit, just as ambiguous at best reviews with nothing better to note than javascript performance begin to poor in, a counter-attack to Google's Chrome would have to be the IT security industry mailing lists- already on the Bugtaq and Full Disclosure mailing lists are already beginning to rack up with twovulnerabilities. How much longer before it's remotely exploitable? Jailbreaking isn't difficult at all if chroot is anything to attest.

Geoffrey.landis writes: "Banning books
According to an an article in the New York Times (scroll down to the bottom-- apparently it's not interesting enough to make the lede) one of Palin's first actions after being elected Mayor of Wasilla in 1996 was to ban books... and when the librarian resisted, Palin fired her:

Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.

Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin's first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. "They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her," Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to "resist all efforts at censorship," Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were "rhetorical."

(According to varioussources, Palin claims that she didn't fire the librarian because she didn't want to ban books... she was just generally firing all the city employees who weren't loyal political supporters."

Michael writes: "Last year a small start-up company had launched SplashTop on ASUS motherboards, which is a lightweight Linux distribution embedded into a flash chip on the motherboard and allows a Linux desktop to be booted in under ten seconds that comes complete with a Firefox web browser, Skype, and Pidgin instant messaging. With the success of embedding Linux onto their motherboards, ASUS has announced they'd be bringing SplashTop onto all of their motherboard products. Now some members of the Phoronix Forums have managed to hack this instant-on Linux distribution. They've been able to inject new Linux applications, run a terminal within the SplashTop environment, run SplashTop off a USB stick, and best of all it can run on any motherboard, just not those from ASUS."

BIOS_LEVEL writes: "The XO is the laptop produced by the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC) headed by Mr. Nicholas Negroponte. The goal of OLPC is to provide every child a laptop which they can use to experience technology and the Internet. Through the Give One Get One program (G1G1), residents of North America are able donate $400 to the OLPC foundation, $200 of which finances a laptop for a child, and $200 of which pays for the cost of delivering one to the donor. Colin Dean was one of the first to participate in G1G1, and this is his review of it."